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Gary Johns

The purpose of this article is to examine the relationships between absenteeism and presenteeism and employee well-being. Absenteeism is the failure to report for work as scheduled. ...
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The purpose of this article is to examine the relationships between absenteeism and presenteeism and employee well-being. Absenteeism is the failure to report for work as scheduled. Presenteeism is showing up to work when one is ill and the decrement in productivity that follows from this practice. On a continuum, presenteeism stands between full work engagement and absenteeism. This article considers how attendance dynamics are affected by employee well-being. It also considers how attendance dynamics might affect well-being, a less researched subject. It takes a broad stance on what constitutes well-being, encompassing physical, mental, and emotional well-being and assuming that a positively evaluated work experience is conducive to employee well-being. It does not assume that the mere occurrence of either behavior somehow “speaks for itself” as an indicator of well-being.

Sharon Clarke

Ensuring high levels of occupational health and safety remains a significant issue. Detailed accident analyses have highlighted the role played by front-line employees as well as the ...
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Ensuring high levels of occupational health and safety remains a significant issue. Detailed accident analyses have highlighted the role played by front-line employees as well as the importance of organizational and managerial factors. The realization that organizational accidents occur within a cultural and social context has led to the rise in popularity of the concept of safety climate. Safety climate allows the individual to interpret organizational events and processes in relation to personal and organizational safety values and to determine the appropriateness of safety-related behavior. Although safety climate has been included as an element of the healthy work organization, the contribution that a positive safety climate can make to organizational health and well-being is little understood. Developing a fuller understanding of organizational safety climate has important theoretical and research implications, and also remains a significant issue for industry and wider society in terms of practical application.

Thomas N. Ingram, Raymond W. Laforge, and Charles H. Schwepker

This article considers the importance of job stress in the sales force to be an important management concern in many sales organizations. The complex business environment faces salespeople ...
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This article considers the importance of job stress in the sales force to be an important management concern in many sales organizations. The complex business environment faces salespeople with escalating demands and expectations. There is continuous pressure to perform in the sales forces of most organizations. Stress is further compounded as salespeople regularly face non-routine situations, and often must work without the support that comes with supervision on a daily basis. The objective of this article is to examine the antecedents and consequences of job stress and to consider initiatives for reducing job stress among salespeople. While eliminating job stress in most sales organizations may be unfeasible, impractical, or even undesirable, the major negative effects of job stress require management initiatives to gain a reasonable level of control over salespeople's job stress. Finally, this article also develops a framework of salesperson job stress including antecedents, role stressors, and consequences.

J. Kevin Ford and Ruchi Sinha

Training evaluation is the systematic collection of descriptive and judgmental information necessary to make effective training decisions. A key characteristic of a systematic approach to ...
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Training evaluation is the systematic collection of descriptive and judgmental information necessary to make effective training decisions. A key characteristic of a systematic approach to training evaluation is an emphasis on the continuous use of feedback. This process, which includes both formative and summative evaluation strategies, can aid in identifying, collecting, and providing information to make a variety of instructional decisions. This article reviews the progress which has been made in evaluation science that has particular relevance to workplace training programs. It first focuses on the implications of the changing nature of work for conducting effective training evaluation. Second, the article describes how the field of training evaluation has progressed in terms of criterion development, measurement issues, and methodology issues. Third, it discusses the key challenges that remain in the field which require additional theory development and research.

Gavin Jack

Postcolonialism provides theoretical resources that speak well to the concerns of critical diversity scholars, notably the interest in culture, power, and the construction of (human) ...
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Postcolonialism provides theoretical resources that speak well to the concerns of critical diversity scholars, notably the interest in culture, power, and the construction of (human) differences. Yet, with notable exceptions, there is a paucity of research on workplace diversity underpinned by postcolonialism. This chapter seeks to animate and advance postcolonial scholarship in critical diversity studies, and responds to calls to revitalize this scholarly sub-field. Based on a review of critical diversity studies (including the few that have used postcolonial perspectives), two recommendations are made to advance postcolonial critiques. First, critical diversity scholars might undertake a closer engagement with psychoanalytic and discursive variants of postcolonial theory to generate complex understandings of the psychological dimensions of (post)colonial subjectivities and the persistence of racism in organizations. Second, scholars might also consider the merits of ‘Southern Theory’ in order to move beyond the noted Eurocentric limits of existing gender and diversity research.

Dave Bartram

Psychological testing probably touches more people more often than any other application of psychology. On-line testing has made tests more available and more accessible. This article ...
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Psychological testing probably touches more people more often than any other application of psychology. On-line testing has made tests more available and more accessible. This article considers the impact the development of the Web has had on employment testing. Its main focus is on the impact the use of remote forms of assessment has had on practice and on the development of new ways of managing the risks associated with assessment “at a distance,” especially in high-stakes situations. The use of the internet for assessment raises many other issues, such as the impact of remote assessment on applicant reactions, implications for the design of robust systems, the use of complex test forms, and on-line simulations, to name but a few.

Kevin Daniels

Psychometrically, affective experience can be represented in two dimensional space. More specific affects cluster at points in this space. These two major dimensions are negative and ...
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Psychometrically, affective experience can be represented in two dimensional space. More specific affects cluster at points in this space. These two major dimensions are negative and positive affect. High negative affect relates to the more specific unpleasant affects of anxiety and anger. Its opposite is relaxation. High positive affect relates to more specific pleasant and high activation affects such as enthusiasm. Its opposite relates to the more specific affects of depression and boredom. Because of the pervasive nature of affect, organizational research has investigated many theoretical and applied issues. The topics of this article include: how cognitive processes influence affect; how cognitive processes regulate affective experience; how state affect influences cognitive processes; and the role of trait affect. There are organizational applications in each domain. The article concludes by highlighting directions for research.

Donald M. Truxillo, David M. Cadiz, and Jennifer R. Rineer

This article examines the implications of an aging workforce for human resource management (HRM). It first looks at research and theories relevant to understanding age-related changes at ...
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This article examines the implications of an aging workforce for human resource management (HRM). It first looks at research and theories relevant to understanding age-related changes at work, including lifespan development theories, changes in work outcomes such as motivation and performance, and the social context for age (e.g., age stereotyping). It then considers the ways that organizations can keep their employees-including those who are aging-satisfied, engaged, productive, and healthy in their jobs in terms of traditional HR practices like recruitment and selection, training, career development, and occupational safety and health. Finally, it offers suggestions on how HRM can take age differences into account and identifies a number of areas for future research.

Annette Risberg and Sine Nørholm Just

Taking as a starting point the assumption that ambiguity is a constitutive condition of organizational practices in general, and, more specifically, practices of diversity, this chapter ...
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Taking as a starting point the assumption that ambiguity is a constitutive condition of organizational practices in general, and, more specifically, practices of diversity, this chapter offers a framework for exploring the practices and perceptions of three forms of ambiguous diversity: strategic ambiguity, contradiction, and ambivalence. Through an illustration of the framework’s empirical applicability, we find that while ambiguity as such is neither inherently good nor bad, the various forms of ambiguity have different potentials for promoting diversity in organizational settings. In particular, expressions of ambivalence seem to be well suited for fostering new and more inclusive practices of diversity.

Kerr Inkson

The boundaryless career type provides a model of career development that appears to have some advantages over traditional occupational or organizational models. In a changing environment, ...
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The boundaryless career type provides a model of career development that appears to have some advantages over traditional occupational or organizational models. In a changing environment, it encourages mobility, flexibility, the development of knowledge and networks, and the taking of responsibility for one's own career. The boundaryless career also resonates effectively with the temporary organization structures and “knowledge workers” becoming characteristic of the new century. It appears a particularly appropriate way of understanding careers in industries, such as film production and software development, that are based on temporary projects rather than permanent structures, but these industries may be merely extreme examples of a wider loosening and crossing of boundaries in the world of work. The organizational career is dead or dying, and boundaryless careers are representative not just of a creative elite of workers, but of the mainstream.